Chapter 2: Trust, Temporality, and Ritualized Play in Intercultural Training

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated how both practitioners and families use the term culture in their discourse as a narrative strategy to mediate clinical interactions. At times, the term is used to install a sense of cultural safety, but it can also be employed to stereotype minority families; thus, hindering the creation of a working alliance. Interestingly, uses of the concept of culture that revealed a non-essentialist perspective were more common among professionals taking part in Transcultural Seminars. In this second chapter, I now look at the conditions and processes that take place during Seminar meetings, and how they can contribute to increasing the intercultural competence of the participants, as revealed in their discourses. To do so, I use insights of game theory and propose to look at Seminars as “games”, at participants as “players”, and speech as “moves”. I then perform a discourse analysis of the practitioners’ narratives, which unfolded in the context of Seminar discussions and during focus groups on this practice. The results notably show that the rules of the game are not the same in Transcultural Seminar meetings as in institutional practice settings, and that these rules invoke an atmosphere of non-evaluation that allows practitioners to learn to shift their perspective and “play” with representations of situations and people. These results were the subject of a poster presentation to an audience of clinicians and researchers at the 5^th congress of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry (WACP) (Johnson-Lafleur, & Rousseau, 2018). They were also published as a scientific paper with a stronger focus on interprofessional collaboration, as presented below.